Miscellaneous Tech News
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Microsoft: Switch to iOS or Android because Windows 10 Mobile is ending
December's Patch Tuesday will contain final updates to the smartphone platform.
Microsoft's guidance for customers is to "move to a supported Android or iOS device" and use the range of Microsoft applications on one of those platforms instead. From the sole perspective of running Microsoft's applications, Android is the better choice; the operating system is more flexible, enabling deeper integration and richer functionality. iOS, however, remains the better choice for long-term operating system support and updates.
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Western Digital’s Black SSD is now focused on gaming, can come with a heatsink
Hardware is mostly unchanged, but new firmware promises better performance.
Western Digital claims the newest entry will offer an option to help PC gamers reduce risk of throttling-related performance dips. That's thanks to an optional heatsink add-on, but the company also credits improved performance to firmware refinements. Other than that, the WD Black SN750 is a modest update over its predecessor. Anandtech benchmarked it and saw some performance improvements over the previous drive, but nothing dramatic—and what improvements were there were largely thanks to the firmware.
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Dealmaster: A bunch of Sonos speakers are discounted for the Super Bowl
Including relatively rare deals on the Sonos Beam, Playbar, and Sub.
Here’s a rundown of the smart-speaker maker’s offerings:
The Sonos Beam soundbar is available for $349, a $50 discount.
The company’s larger soundbar, the Sonos Playbar, is available for $599, a $100 discount.
The Sonos Playbase, a speaker designed to sit under TVs that aren’t wall mounted, is available for $599, a $100 discount.
The Sonos Sub wireless subwoofer is also available for $599, another $100 discount.
Various bundles that include a mixture of the products above and/or the company’s Sonos One smart speakers are also discounted. -
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@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Dealmaster: A bunch of Sonos speakers are discounted for the Super Bowl
Including relatively rare deals on the Sonos Beam, Playbar, and Sub.
Here’s a rundown of the smart-speaker maker’s offerings:
The Sonos Beam soundbar is available for $349, a $50 discount.
The company’s larger soundbar, the Sonos Playbar, is available for $599, a $100 discount.
The Sonos Playbase, a speaker designed to sit under TVs that aren’t wall mounted, is available for $599, a $100 discount.
The Sonos Sub wireless subwoofer is also available for $599, another $100 discount.
Various bundles that include a mixture of the products above and/or the company’s Sonos One smart speakers are also discounted.does @scottalanmiller use these?
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“The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging
George RR Martin's platform switch reminds us of an early blogging giant greatly changed.
Last April, famed writer and hero-murderer George R.R. Martin announced that he was hoisting his ancient blog from his moldering LiveJournal onto his personal website. For casual Game of Thrones fans, it was a minor hiccup at best—most clicked the new link and never looked back. For a certain strata of enthusiasts, however, this was a far more momentous move. Described as “the last holdout” by longtime LiveJournal volunteer-turned-employee Janine Costanzo, Martin’s blog was perhaps the once-blogging-giant’s last bond to the world of great pop culture. So while the author may never finish his most beloved literary series, his simple act of Web hosting logistics truly marks the end of an era.
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I forgot LiveJournal existed. Don't think that I've ever seen it used.
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@Dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Dealmaster: A bunch of Sonos speakers are discounted for the Super Bowl
Including relatively rare deals on the Sonos Beam, Playbar, and Sub.
Here’s a rundown of the smart-speaker maker’s offerings:
The Sonos Beam soundbar is available for $349, a $50 discount.
The company’s larger soundbar, the Sonos Playbar, is available for $599, a $100 discount.
The Sonos Playbase, a speaker designed to sit under TVs that aren’t wall mounted, is available for $599, a $100 discount.
The Sonos Sub wireless subwoofer is also available for $599, another $100 discount.
Various bundles that include a mixture of the products above and/or the company’s Sonos One smart speakers are also discounted.does @scottalanmiller use these?
I do not, but I have supported them for customers.
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@Danp said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Want to spin up Ubuntu VMs from Windows 10's command line, eh? We'll need to see a Multipass
Basically a quick way to spin up an Ubuntu VM on Hyper-V.
However, WSL has some hulking limitations of its own, being more a compatibility layer and lacking a Linux Kernel....
Multipass, at its core, is a service to manage Linux (in this case, Ubuntu) virtual machines in Windows 10 without the overhead of faffing about with Hyper-V (although Hyper-V is most definitely required to make the thing work).
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
I forgot LiveJournal existed. Don't think that I've ever seen it used.
I used to use it.
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@scottalanmiller Reminds me of this. :grinning_face:
https://henryherz.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/multipass.jpeg
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@Danp I'm pretty sure that it reminds everyone of that, haha.
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@scottalanmiller Only us nerds.
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@Danp Yeah thought the same thing
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@Danp I'm pretty sure that it reminds everyone of that, haha.
Which means that leeloodallas or some variation thereof will move up a few ranks in the "bad password" lists that comes around every year or two.
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15-inch, 4K OLED laptops are coming thanks to new displays from Samsung
Samsung could provide the new panel to OEMs for laptops launching this year.
Samsung's 15.6-inch display has a brightness range of 0.0005 to 600 nits, and its spectrum of 34 million colors is double that of similar, 15-inch LCD panels. Samsung claims that its panel can produce blacks that are 200 times darker than those of LCD panels, and whites will be more than twice as bright. These attributes contribute to the HDR capabilities of the panel, and the company claims that the panel passes VESA's new DisplayHDR TrueBlack standard.
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VoIP.ms - New Feature: Phone Book Groups
The phone book groups feature is located under "DID Numbers" then under "Phone Book". You can now create unique groups that fit your needs (e.g. family, work or friends)! Groups can also be used in combination with our CallerID filtering feature. You could for instance route all your calls from your "family" group to your personal mobile.
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Google planning changes to Chrome that could break ad blockers
The APIs that ad blockers depend on are also popular among malicious extensions.
Google is planning to change the way extensions integrate with its Chrome browser. The company says that the changes are necessary for and motivated by a desire to crack down on malicious extensions, which undermine users' privacy and security, as part of the company's continued efforts to make extensions safer. The move also means that popular ad blocking extensions such as uBlock Origin and uMatrix will, according to their developer, no longer work.
